Christoph Eschenbach played withRead more the Boston Symphony the first Mozart piano concerto I believe I heard live, and certainly the first that affected me as Mozart has affected me since. Taking place sometime in the early 1960s, that performance of No. 21 seemed at the time transcendent. I found each note falling in place magically: the music seemed both to be moving through time and all of a piece. It was as if I were slowly turning a beautiful orb in my hand. The whole was always there, but I could only see one shining segment at a time. That paradoxical feeling has remained a kind of standard for this music: it’s the reason why (usually) I prefer Toscanini to Furtwangler, Colin Davis to Bernstein, or, to be more germane, the less celebrated Eschenbach to Barenboim. I willingly sacrifice a local effect, however intriguing, that distorts the shape or coherence of the whole.

When, a few years later in the 1960s, Eschenbach started to record the Mozart piano sonatas, I found those performances almost equally satisfying. Here was a pianist content to play the music as he found it, to illuminate what was there in these more modest works without the virtuoso’s irritable reaching after special effects. Eschenbach’s is the recording of the complete sonatas that I first recommend. Perhaps inevitably, I found this two-disc reissue of five of Mozart’s greatest concertos eminently satisfying. Recorded in 1977 and 1978, the performances are always well-shaped, beautifully played, delicate and yet with a thread of iron running through them. The Andantino of the “Jeunehomme” is both transparent—who has written more simply for the piano than Mozart?—and in its own way powerful. The vivid Presto that follows is equally convincing. There are recordings with more tension than these: Gieseking and Cantelli of No. 9, Schnabel’s recordings of Nos. 19 and 21. Often I like to hear the fireworks of a Uchida performance. But these recordings by Eschenbach are in their own way flawless.

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